I understand his poetry
At the hidden plane
Where words find no air
For their existence.
Where there resides
The memory of men
The first and deepest remembrances
Among all.

The understanding
Is guttural
Untaught
Catching only a haze
Of it's shape.

The instinct of an animal
A knowing
Unarticulated.

Aan'allien

Go.

I wait here alone.

A man
No
Ten
No, not ten
A hundred
A thousand
An infinite sum
I am all but
None.

Of the Sun
By the Moon
I am
The Glade
Unobscured
Alexandria's beacon
Untarnished
Seething
In the black of
Storms
And whiplashed
Skies.

That Night breaks upon me.
Brilliance
Onyx
Upon a tendril
Shivering
In this
Forsaken place.

Broken now
The sum
Of all men
Unwholesome
Unspoken
Unseen.

I am
A Man
Everyday.

Broken and whole
A beacon and a shade
Shattered and forged
Anew and old.

Complete in that.

A lone man.

--
"Aan'allien"
The Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time.
Mean:  One man alone or All men in one

To Live Again

On a day
Our distances shall close
Like a thunderclap.

We shall speak in tones
Free of hurt.

Two friends with
Shared histories and
Necessary trials.

To mourn no longer
This flight.

Today is not that day.

It is for questions
Asked
Of the Ocean.

A pause
To kneel
At the Barrow.

To find
Answers and
An end.

To break
The binding
Of time.

Journey
The waters
No Odysseus has known.

Sheathe
The light
In calcined flesh.

Scream then
For fire
And for pain.

A time to die
And
Live again.

--
"To die and live again"
A line borrowed from the Karatheon Prophecies - The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan.
An idea understood at the doorway to this poem.

You dirty little bugger

Just a pimp.

Buggering around with whichever feeling
To scrawl a piece or two.

Does there remain a bone of honesty
In this desecrating hand?

Perhaps it's simpler truth.

Motion
Is sometimes more important.

Stasis
Is death.

Ever wonder
What place was right
And what place wrong
Where you stood
On what holy or
Blighted ground?

Steel Face

That fraud.

Someone he is not.
Belonging to nothing
And just not.

Does it occupy his lonely hours
These disquieting buzz knots?

Who?

Did he ever find
Who could be him
Who could be he?

Think not.

But she
She
Flew free.

Now only himself
To abide by.

In darkness
Does it come
That forbidden thought?
A quick end
By the barrel
To that buzzing Comb?

No? He stupefies me.

Does he still
Watch for
A thread
Crimson and distant
Holding promise?

Or thorns?

More
With no end?

Pain
Unseen.

But smiles wreath
Like sickly vine
That steel face.

Always
A battle or
Two
To be found.

Unsought it awaits.
A quiet spot
In a hidden recess.

In you
The dance has already
Always
Stayed in motion.
An endless flow
In spaces
Now filled
Now bereft.

The blade flickers
Between
The opposites
Of the binding circle.
In there
Is only grace.

An imagined
Blade
For very real battles.

For you, you who make my poetry sing.

The Leaving

There is nothing.

Nothing
In the betweens
Of our spinning worlds.

Or

In those moments
We stretch
From existence to an end
There are only hollows.

We have departed the field
Once filled by our bodies
In that
Wanders only
The memory that
Wanes.

Better to forget
It ever was.

The skies have opened for us
My love.

The Law of No Regret

Light 
Cannot be shattered
Shadow 
Cannot be unbound.

Some things
Are not forgiven
Some things
Are not remade.

It is good to remember
The sanctity
In all things
Broken and Whole.

Who knows where they walk
What fates they heel
These booted men
To their darker ends?

I think I know too much
Of covens and bitches.
It lingers richly
That foul aftertaste.

You come back only
To loneliness
And pride.

Write from what you are.

4 inches of a point

That knife
On the dark wood table
I put in him
And
Down his length it
Ran.
What a sound has flesh
Given voice.

You took her
I took you.

We're even.

We know where they stand
The dead and
The dying.
Upon which brink
Upon what land.

You stick that blade in me
And you'll find
Pretty soon
That I'm pulling it out
Of you.

Better you, than me.
Better me, than you.
Better the world, than us.

To a friend: 17

You were right for me
Thought I,
Who soon
Turned,
To
Stars and Centaurs
In visions of
Terrible wrongs
Writ
In the black abyss of
Pitch and prophecy,
While outside this door
An Ocean lapped
At vestiges
Of what remained
From a night
Of words
And utterance
Made in heat and union,
Now
Torn and ragged by
Morning blaze
From gutted flesh
So steeped in
Vitriol and vinegar,
I could no longer ignore
This possession
By fine lies,
Promises,
Stitched into seams
Of the Flesh.

On Poetry

Great Poetry
Lodges itself in the Flesh.

Like the sword's thrust
Like the dart's flight
Like the clarion's call
We find ourselves
Unable
To avoid
It's reckless path.

Like all Art
Of substance and form,
It will force upon us
A dire need
To look
Beyond
Our immediate circumstance, and
Sometimes,
Even within.

It is Nectar
Imbued with
Otherworldly ability
To recall
A soul to itself,
To it's earthly torment or bliss,

Such as the case may be.

Your name shall be Broken

I shall scatter
The weight of your name into
The pilings of the wharf
And the refuse of the
Ever moving Sea
Shall rend and return it,
To the loam
Of it's beginnings.

And there will you remain,
Unrecognised and
Disfigured.

--
As Borges wrote in "The Golem"

"If, as the Greek maintains in the Cratylus,
a name is the archetype of a thing,
the rose is in the letters that spell rose
and the Nile entire resounds in it's name's ring."

Dream: 19

From above barrows
From under sun
We
Crept
Into a dead counsel,
Of stones
And the Tamarisk.

Dread: 23

Better to have drunk of life,
Than of the Raven's omens.

Existential God

Do you,
O Human
Bear your burden
Of passage
Well?

Do you
Yet,
Wander
Labyrinthine,
The passages of dream
Places,
Inscriptions and
Walls,
That bestow no secrets?

If you,
By barbed path
Traverse
The tongues, and
Hold prayer - A god's song,
A temple will be built
In each of us,
For
Time and breath
Spent,
Under the slowing pallor
Of a withered sun,
A surrendered land.

By flame and rock,
Do we burn
Do we search, for an
Existential God.

Memory & Longing: 24

Let go
And let go
The ghosts
Of the haunting
Deeps.